Dalet Galaxy Manages and Customises Large Scale IMF Operations

Dalet has developed an IMF workflow powered by the company’s Galaxy media asset amangement software. The Interoperable Mastering Format, IMF, is designed to simplify and standardize processing and packaging for multi-platform, multi-lingual, multi-resolution delivery. Validated and supported by SMPTE, IMF is an emerging standardized mastering format for facilities that need to distribute many different profiles and versions with reliable interoperability. To manage and package IMF content at scale, the process relies on an efficient media asset management and orchestration system.

Chief media scientist Bruce Devlin at Dalet said, “Today, IMF packages are becoming simpler to create and interchange, but the lack of a fixed file or folder naming scheme is making management of IMF more complex - especially when tens and hundreds of supplemental packages per title are involved. Implementing a MAM and orchestration platform such as Dalet Galaxy will allow you to scale and industrialize your operation and broker the many IMF workflows with greater ease and accuracy, and at a much lower cost of production.”

Dalet has been evolving capabilities for IMF workflows within its platforms and systems since 2013. Recognition of the accuracy and robustness of the company’s approach is recent Netflix compliance approval awarded to the Dalet AmberFin transcoding platform, which means that producers and facilities creating IMF packages for their Netflix targeted content can use Dalet’s IMF processing for this work.

Dalet Galaxy IMF Workflow

The Dalet Galaxy MAM and Orchestration engine includes tools to manage IMF packages at the production, distribution and contribution stages of media handling. These ranges from importing IMF packages natively into the MAM, to visualizing IMF structures and components with Dalet Context Maps, to building versions and supplemental packages with Dalet Track Stack and Version Editor, and eventually wrapping the compositions for distribution using a connector to IMF-compliant transcoding such as Dalet AmberFin.

The main factors in the Galaxy IMF workflow are the ability to edit the metadata of any of the assets – the title, media assets, Composition Playlist (CPL) and so on, and searching the system for any of the assets against any of the specified imported metadata from the CPL XML data and technical metadata from the media files. It also avoids having to deal with enforced folder naming conventions, and allows asset and title names to become useful, trackable values.

You may view the relationship between the IMF assets, and deliver any CPL in a title as an Interoperable Master Package. The workflow maintains output distribution profiles per client along with unique assets for that distribution, such as watermarked assets. To download a white paper on scaling IMF operations, visit Dalet’s resource page, here. www.dalet.com